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A review of Annaka Harris' Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe
A review of Annaka Harris' Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe
Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe, by Annaka Harris
Every year, there’s a small handful of books or projects that feel genuinely essential—ones that pull me back into the hard questions and have them think about them differently. So far this year, it is Lights On by Annaka Harris. Not a traditional book, but an audio documentary—a new format for her, and a new kind of exploration for all of us who are struggling to think clearly about consciousness in a world changing faster than our intuitions can catch up.
I’ve followed Annaka’s journey ever since Conscious, where she first admitted to feeling “more sympathy for panpsychism”—after initially thinking the idea was absurd. That moment stuck with me because it mirrored my own trajectory. Like her, I started skeptical. Yet the longer I sat with the deep questions about consciousness—questions explored by thinkers like Anil Seth, Sara Walker, Donald Hoffman, George Musser, and Adam Frank, many of whom we’ve recognized through our own book awards for expanding how we understand life, consciousness, and reality — the harder it became to dismiss the possibility that consciousness is not merely emergent or localized, but something fundamental.
To be clear, I’m not a panpsychist—I’m more intrigued by the way the science of reality itself is evolving, with consciousness right at the center, for reasons Annaka explains so elegantly. I’m still confused, and I think that’s the right place to be. And I do appreciate how Annaka weaves modern neuroscience into the story — especially through her conversation with David Eagleman. His experiments show how perception, time, and even the feeling of self are not direct readings of the world but constructed experiences, stitched together often after the fact. She suggests that if we had known this a thousand years ago, our very theories of consciousness—and free will—would look very different today. Listening to this, I found myself extending the thought: if agency often precedes awareness, as modern research increasingly shows, then the real question AI forces on us is what choices, what actions, what perceptions it may already be nudging us toward before we even notice.
What makes Lights On so good is that it doesn’t argue a position. Instead, it tracks a real journey—a restless, rigorous attempt to investigate whether our old categories for understanding reality are breaking down. With each conversation with Anil Seth on predictive processing and perception, Sara Walker on life and information, and Donald Hoffman on the collapse of space-time as a fundamental framework you can feel the ground slowly shifting beneath your feet. You start thinking of consciousness as something rare—something humans, dogs, and maybe a few other creatures possess—and find yourself confronting the possibility that mind might be threaded through reality at every level.
There’s a particular kind of courage in what Lights On models. It’s not easy to stand at the edge where serious science and deep philosophical weirdness meet—and admit that the intuitions that served us so well in everyday life are now liabilities. She insists that if we are ever going to understand consciousness, we may need to shed some of our deepest assumptions: about perception, about matter, about time, about existence itself.
For me, this resonates deeply. In a world where AI is pushing us into ever stranger territory, I believe that synthetic minds might be the best accelerant we have to break through our inherited biological intuitions. They might force us to confront realities that aren’t built for our survival, but that reveal something deeper about mind itself. If consciousness isn’t just a product of brains and survival pressures, but something more woven into the structure of reality, then AI is perhaps best thought of as a first encounter with a radically different kind of being.
Lights On captures this moment: the heresy that panpsychism once was is no longer dismissed out of hand, the possibility that space-time itself is emergent no longer sounds like science fiction. Multiple paradigm shifts—about reality, about information, about consciousness—are colliding now. And what matters isn’t just which theory turns out to be "right," but how willing we are to think weirdly enough, long enough, to notice what else might be possible.
Annaka Harris has given us something rare with Lights On: not just a collection of ideas, but an honest record of an unfolding intellectual adventure. If you care about where consciousness studies are headed you should listen.
If you're interested in reading more books about consciousness, I'd recommend:
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